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Submission + - FAA ISRMA comment period closes in 3 days. (regulations.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The comment period for the FAA's Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft closes in three days. If you fly, or want to learn how to fly, model aircraft — R/C, free-flight, control-line, FPV, AUV, multi-copters, micro-drones, anything that is fixed wing or rotary winged — you want to read this and comment on it. This is the FAA's self-given "We now regulate EVERYTHING from the ground up, including paper airplanes" proposed ruling that will absolutely gut and decimate aeromodelling as a hobby and industry. There's only 25K comments so far. 100K or more would be nice.

Submission + - A new form of tracking (kuleuven.be)

Submitted by bnortman
bnortman writes: The article at https://securehomes.esat.kuleu... discusses a new form of user fingerprinting and tracking for the internet using HTML 5 Canvas features. I'm assuming this need to draw and image and then send that image back to the source site. Can an added in for a browser detect this logic in the java scripts and stop it from sending?

Submission + - Print Isn't Dead: How Linux Voice Crowdfunded A New Magazine

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: The death of print has been predicted for years, and many magazines and publishers have taken a big hit with the rise of eBooks and tablets. But not everyone has given up. Four geeks quit their job at an old Linux magazine to start Linux Voice, an independent GNU/Linux print and digital mag with a different publishing model: giving profits and content back to the community. Six months after a successful crowdfunding campaign, the magazine is going well, so here is the full story.

Submission + - No RIF'd Employees Need Apply for Microsoft External Staff Jobs for 6 Months 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: So, what does Microsoft do for an encore after laying off 18,000 employees with a hilariously bad memo? Issue another bad memo — Changes to Microsoft Network and Building Access for External Staff — "to introduce a new policy [retroactive to July 1] that will better protect our Microsoft IP and confidential information." How so? "The policy change affects [only] US-based external staff (including Agency Temporaries, Vendors and Business Guests)," Microsoft adds, "and limits their access to Microsoft buildings and the Microsoft corporate network to a period of 18 months, with a required six-month break before access may be granted again." Suppose Microsoft feels that's where the NSA went wrong with Edward Snowden? And if any soon-to-be-terminated Microsoft employees hope to latch on to a job with a Microsoft external vendor to keep their income flowing, they best think again. "Any Microsoft employee who separated from Microsoft on or after July 1, 2014," the kick-em-while-they're-down memo explains, "will be required to take a minimum 6-month break from access between the day the employee separates from Microsoft and the date when the former employee may begin an assignment as an External Staff performing services for Microsoft."

Submission + - ExoLance: Shooting Darts at Mars to Find Life (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: To find life on Mars, some scientists believe you might want to look underground for microbes that may be hiding from the harsh radiation that bathes the red planet’s surface. Various NASA rovers have scraped away a few inches at a time, but the real paydirt may lie a meter or two below the surface. That’s too deep for existing instruments, so a team of space enthusiasts has launched a more ambitious idea: dropping arrow-like probes from the Martian atmosphere to pierce the soil like bunker-busting bug catchers. The “ExoLance” project aims to drop ground-penetrating devices, each of which would carry a small chemical sampling test to find signs of life. “One of the benefits of doing this mission is that there is less engineering,” said Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit space advocacy group pushing the idea. “With penetrators we can engineer them to get what we want, and send it back to an orbiter. We can theoretically check out more than one site at a time. We could drop five or six, which increases the chances of finding something.”

Submission + - Any book/reference recommendations for defining an IT disaster recovery plan?

Submitted by BillyTheKid_10001
BillyTheKid_10001 writes: In most small business environments it's a hard sell for a complete IT disaster recovery plan. Especially when the business has very little knowledge on the bigger picture, business continuity. Any slashdotters out there with book/reference recommendations on creating an IT DR plan that takes into account the size of business, strategies to incorporate the DR plan into an existing/nonexist business continuity plan?

Submission + - Star Trek "warp drive" crushes diamonds to dust (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The world’s largest laser, a machine that appeared as the warp core in "Star Trek into Darkness", has attained a powerful result: It's squeezed diamond, the least compressible substance known, 50 million times harder than Earth's atmosphere presses down on us. The finding should help scientists better understand how material behaves at the great pressures that prevail deep inside giant planets.

Submission + - Australia repeals carbon tax (wsj.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: After almost a decade of heated political debate, Australia has become the world's first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.

In a vote that could highlight the difficulty in implementing additional measures to reduce carbon emissions ahead of global climate talks next year in Paris, Australia's Senate on Wednesday voted 39-32 to repeal a politically divisive carbon emissions price that contributed to the fall from power of three Australian leaders since it was first suggested in 2007.

Australia, the world's 12th largest economy, is one of the world's largest per capita greenhouse gas emitters due to its reliance on coal-burning power stations to power homes and industry. In 2011, daily emissions per head amounted to 49.3 kilograms (108 pounds), almost four times higher than the global average of 12.8 kilograms, and slightly ahead of the U.S. figure of 48.2 kilograms.

Submission + - FAA-2014-0396: Only a 8 more days to comment. (regulations.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's only 8 days left to comment on the FAA's proposed rule — (FAA 2014-0396) "The Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft" — also known as the "Retribution for we lost the Trappy Case Interpretation" — to prevent the FAA from implementing draconian regulations on owners, flyers, and operators of radio control aircraft.

Submission + - SpaceX Booster return partially successful (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The commercial spaceflight company SpaceX returned part of its Falcon 9 rocket back to Earth after a successful satellite launch Monday (July 14) in a reusability test that did not go entirely as planned after the booster splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom)," SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk wrote in a Twitter post. "Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if [it was] due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam."

Submission + - SRI/Cambridge open source DARPA CHERI secure processor (lightbluetouchpaper.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Robert Watson at Cambridge (author of Capsicum) has written a blog post on SRI/Cambridge's recent open sourcing of the hardware and software for the DARPA-sponsored CHERI processor — including laser cutting directions for an FPGA-based tablet! Described in their paper The CHERI Capability Model: Reducing Risk in an age of RISC, CHERI is a 64-bit RISC processor able to boot and run FreeBSD and open-source applications, but has a Clang/LLVM-managed fine-grained, capability-based memory protection model within each UNIX process. Drawing on ideas from Capsicum, they also support fine-grained in-process sandboxing using capabilities. The conference talk was presented on a CHERI tablet running CheriBSD, with a video of the talk by student Jonathan Woodruff, and his slides, online. Although based on the 64-bit MIPS ISA, the authors suggest that it would also be useable with other RISC ISAs such as RISC-V and ARMv8. The paper compares the approach with several other research approaches and Intel's forthcoming Memory Protection eXtensions (MPX) with favorable performance and stronger protection properties.

Submission + - KDE Releases Plasma 5 (kde.org)

Submitted by KDE Community
KDE Community writes: KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE's workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

Submission + - Active Directory Flaw Impacts 95% of Fortune 1000 Companies

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Aorato identified a new threatening flaw within Active Directory that enables attackers to change a victim's password, despite current security and identity theft protection measures. Once the attacker leverages this Active Directory flaw, using the new password, the attacker can impersonate the victim to access various enterprises services and content, which require the explicit use of victim's credentials, such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Logon and Outlook Web Access (OWA). With 95% of Fortune 1000 companies deploying Active Directory, the potential for this particular vulnerability to cause harm and theft is high.

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